1

CLOUGH’S LAST SUMMER

Philip J Stewart

One of the puzzles of Victorian literature is the eight-year silence of Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-

61). He appears to have composed no verse at all between the middle of 1853 and the spring of

1861, apart from some experimental translations from Homer1. Special interest attaches therefore to

the long poem that he poured out in the last summer of his life, Tales on Board or Mari Magno

(referred to hereafter as Tales), and to the circumstances of its composition.

If there is any expression of the thoughts and feelings of the missing years, it should be in Tales.

However, many critics, especially in the last half century, have been rather dismissive of this last

work, holding that Clough had become conventional and ordinary in his views and that his poetic

imagination had grown weak. This contrasts with the views of some earlier critics. W. Y. Sellar

thought ‘he had here struck on one of his happiest veins’; J. A. Symonds said it showed him to be ‘a

better Crabbe’; an anonymous reviewer in the Contemporary Review found that the tales ‘attract the

reader in the way that Chaucer attracts’; H. W. Garrod believed that, if it could not be called his

masterpiece, it was ‘only because he died in the middle of writing it’. He wrote ‘There is nothing

that I more desire than that someone who has not read Mari Magno should be lured into doing so.’2

Part of the trouble came from the title, Mari Magno ‘on the great sea’, which recalls the opening

lines of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Book 2: ‘how pleasant, when the winds whip up the waters

over a great sea, to watch from land the trouble of others!’ To those with a classical education, this

could sound as if it meant that Clough was smugly satisfied to be able, from the refuge of a happy

marriage, to look with equanimity on the suffering of others. However, there is no reason to suppose

that he was thinking of anything more than the literal meaning of the two words, for he gave Norton

the same title for two other poems, both composed in 1852-3 (Poems3, 767-8): ‘Where lies the land’

(which appeared at one point as a possible envoi to Tales; see below) conveys the exhilaration of

being in mid-ocean (Poems, 342; 750); ‘Some future day’ looks forward to being able to recollect

emotion in tranquillity (Poems, 338; 746). As for his feelings about Lucretian Schadenfreude, they

are expressed in the following lines, deleted from the manuscript of Amours de Voyage, on Britain’s

failure to come to the aid of the Roman Republic in 1849 (Poems, 631):

O happy Englishmen we! That so truly can quote from Lucretius

Suave Mari Magno - how pleasant indeed in a tempest

Safe on the beach to look out and behold the great trouble of others,

O blessed government ours, blessed Empire of Purse and Policeman!

2

Mari Magno was a misleading title for another reason. Clough’s education had been almost entirely

classical, and most of his readers had the same background. It is not surprising that his previous

poetry was full of allusions to ancient literature and history, and that many of his titles were in Latin

or Greek. In Tales, however, he consciously addresses a wider audience in a style inspired by

Chaucer or Crabbe4. The titles are in English, except for ‘Currente Calamo’, (also ‘Primitiae’ as an

alternative to ‘Third Cousins’, later ‘The Lawyer’s First Tale’ - hereafter ‘Lawyer I’ – and ‘A la

Banquette’ for ‘A Modern Pilgrimage’). In this paper I use the English titles.

Since interpretation of the poem has been influenced so much by ideas about the state of mind in

which the reader believes it to have been written, it seems necessary to give some account of

Clough’s last years. Three things changed in his life after his return from America in June 1853: the

immediate start of his humdrum job at the Office of Education, his marriage to Blanche Smith in

June 1854 and the beginning of his exhausting voluntary work for Blanche’s cousin Florence

Nightingale in August 1856. His letters during this period are curiously impersonal and detached.

The consensus has been that overwork and poor health account for his poetic silence. It is possible,

though, that marriage to Blanche was stifling him and that the old Clough smouldered on beneath

the calm exterior.

Clough was undoubtedly a dutiful husband, but it is strange that he was willing to give up so much

of his spare time to clerical work for the Nightingale Fund. When Blanche was pregnant in 1857 she

went home to live with her father while Clough and her mother worked to support Florence, after

whom he named the baby the following year. Blanche clearly disapproved, writing after his death:

‘unfortunately, he was too willing and too anxious to take work of every sort and to spend himself

for others. Therefore he soon became involved in labours too exciting for a constitution already

somewhat overtasked’ (PPR5, 45).

The most often quoted account of the marriage has been that of Blanche herself, the undoubted

author of the memoir in PPR6, where she wrote that ‘… his life did reach a sort of culmination, that

a great-hearted man did for a short time find his natural repose in the pleasures of a home… The

humour which in solitude had been inclined to take the hue of irony and sarcasm, now found its

natural and healthy outlet… [The] new experience which he was daily gathering at home made

many perplexed questions, both social and religious, clear and simple to his mind... The close and

constant contact with another mind gave him fresh insight into his own’ (PPR, 44-45) and so on for

five pages. People writing to Blanche after his death naturally said nothing to contradict this view.

Other observers suggest a less happy Clough. Herbert Spencer, meeting him and Blanche in the

Highlands in the autumn of 1860, wrote: ‘He was a very reserved, undemonstrative man, who

usually took little share in general conversation. His face had a weary expression which seemed to

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imply either chronic physical discomfort or chronic depression – an apparent depression which

suggested that he was oppressed by consciousness of the mystery of things.’7 Jowett, who assured

Blanche ‘I have always considered his marriage as the real blessing and happiness of his life.’ (letter

no. 1099 of c. 20th

November 1861, Corr.8 605) told Florence Nightingale: ‘Life was dark to him,

and his wife and children made him as happy as he was capable of being made.’9 W. J. Stillman,

who saw much of the Cloughs in the winter of 1859-60, remarked that ‘there seemed to be in him

an arcanum of thought, something beyond what came into everyday existence, - a life beyond the

actual life, into which he withdrew, and out of which he came to speak.’10

The impression is of a man locked inside himself, terribly alone with his thoughts. Clough’s old

friends had become ‘churchy’ (Corr. 460), and his new friends were on the other side of the Atlantic

– and even in them he did not confide. Blanche adored him, or rather her image of him; she was

determined to deny his scepticism and to believe that he was still in some sense a Christian.

Whatever her intelligence, its working was inhibited by her deeply held prejudices. Biswas, on the

basis of a penetrating analysis of the period of the engagement, concluded that Clough’s marriage

was ‘intellectual suicide’11

. However, John Addington Symonds’ often quoted description of her as

‘thick-sighted’ can perhaps be discounted; he was contrasting ‘a clear-sighted man [Frederic Myers]

and a thick-sighted woman’12

; the remark may have been partly sexist.

Depression seems the best description of Clough’s state during the silent years. He had also been

depressed during his time at University Hall, October 1849 to December 1851, and often as a

student at Oxford, October 1837 to March 1842. On the other hand, there had been periods of

exaltation – frequent episodes during his last years at Rugby and as an undergraduate at Oxford, and

above all during his Highland visit in the summer of 1847 and in the months following his

resignation of his tutorship in March 1848. It is risky to apply modern psychiatric concepts to the

dead, but he does seem to have had what is now called a bipolar temperament, alternating between

depression and mania. As a student he often spoke brilliantly at a dinner or in a debate at the

Decade, only to come back to his rooms and berate himself for having been ‘foolish’.

One may ask how far Clough’s marriage contributed to his depressed mood of the 1850s. He had

gone into it determined to have no illusions. He made this clear repeatedly to his fiancée, for

example in the letter he wrote to her, newly engaged, on his thirty-third birthday (Corr. 300;

Reconsideration, 431-2):

What was the true apple? Do you know? I believe its true name was ‘Love is everything’.

Women will believe so and try and make men act as if they believed so, and straightway,

behold, the Fall, and Paradise at an end etc., etc.

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Love is not everything, Blanche; don’t believe it, nor try to make me pretend to believe it.

‘Service’ is everything. Let us be fellow-servants. There is no joy nor happiness, nor way

nor name by which men may be saved but by this.

So had Clough been saved? Had fellow service brought him joy and happiness? Would a love-

match have made him happier? That these questions were exercising him in 1861 seems clear from

the fact that, while travelling alone on the Continent, he spent much of his time composing a series

of poems, full of autobiographical elements, on love’s opportunities lost, on marriage as arbitrary

juxtaposition, on marriage gone wrong – and on simple voyeurism. One should not expect

straightforward answers, for he was a complex man with a powerful intellect and strong emotions.

He also combined a strong sense of humour with his deep seriousness, and he often ridiculed

himself as well as writing satirically about others.

Clough’s health began to break down when he had scarlet fever at the end of 1859. His mother died

soon after, adding to his unhappiness, and in October 1860 he finally started a long sick leave, from

which he was never to return. He underwent a water cure for a month before Christmas and a month

after it at Malvern, to no avail. It is interesting, in view of what happened in the following summer,

that he wrote to Blanche from Malvern (unpublished, dated only ‘Monday’): ‘Where shall we go? I

don’t want to rush into Alfred’s bosom at Freshwater.’ In fact that is exactly where they did go

towards the end of February, and they stayed for about six weeks. Clough had known Tennyson

since at least 1852, and he seems to have had a special regard for Emily Tennyson, 5½ years his

senior, to whom he presented a copy of the one-volume version of his Plutarch’s Lives in 186013

.

During this visit he may have come to see her as a mother figure and confidante. While there, he

broke his poetic silence, penning ‘Trunks the forest yielded’ and ‘From thy far sources’.

In April, thanks partly to a gift of £500 from Florence Nightingale, Clough embarked on a cruise to

Greece and Turkey and then, after three unhappy weeks trying to attend to business in England, on

travels in Auvergne and the Pyrenees. It was during these trips that he composed the poems that

were to form Tales. There is more information on these last seven months than on the preceding

eight years. Clough sent at least fifty letters and received many. He poured verse into three

notebooks and crammed both poetic drafts and journal entries into a pocket diary of 244 pages

(Poems, 768-9). This is one of three ‘synoptic diaries’, the other two being Hallam Tennyson’s

‘French Diary’ (27th

June to 28th

September) and Emily Tennyson’s Journal14

(unfortunately much

edited). It is thus possible to work out a detailed chronology of his movements and his writing.

A few simple assumptions can be made: (1) that he drafted in his diary only when he did not have a

notebook to hand, in ink when available and otherwise in pencil15

; (2) that he wrote preferably on

unused diary pages for past dates as well as on blank pages at the beginning and end; (3) as his

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habit was to compose on the recto of pages in the notebooks, what is written on verso pages was

written later, sometimes considerably later; (4) that drafts in the diary follow roughly the sequence

of composition. The last assumption is less certain than the others, but it applies well to the tales of

ascertainable date - ‘Lawyer I’ (before mid-June), ‘A Modern Pilgrimage’ (25/26 July), the bridge

passage to ‘Currente Calamo’ (by 31st August), ‘The Officer’s Story’ (early September), ‘The

Lawyer’s Second Tale’ (hereafter ‘Lawyer II’ (after mid-September).

The first tale in the diary is ‘Third Cousins’ or ‘Primitiae’ (beginnings, first-fruits), later to become

‘Lawyer I’. This was written, Blanche tells us (PPR, 51), during Clough’s voyage to Greece and

Turkey, 20th

April to 5th

June. It runs from the front of the diary to the blank page facing 14th

to 16th

February, and continues in reverse direction on the blank pages at the back, running eventually into

December. He made a fair copy in the first of the notebooks (Mulhauser’s MS B). This is identical

in format with the second notebook, MS A, except in having exactly half as many pages, suggesting

that both were bought in the same place, perhaps Bordeaux, where he stayed on 10th

June and again

on 26th

and 27th

July. He must have left this first fair copy in London, where he stayed from 15th

June to 6th

July; there is no other way to explain the fact that he made a second fair copy in MS A.

Clough clearly conceived ‘Third Cousins’ as a self-contained poem and not as part of a sequence; it

is longer than any of the other tales and differs from them, except ‘My Tale’, in being told in the

first person (though, when it is put into the mouth of the lawyer, he cautions that it may not be his

own story). It is in tetrameters, while the others, except the unfinished ‘Officer’s Story’, are in

heroic couplets. It starts with holiday visits of the narrator as a boy to his mother’s second cousin

and her clergyman husband, who have six daughters. In successive stays he becomes increasingly

attracted to Emily, two years his senior, but he puts her off by his smug displays of schoolboy

learning. He takes an Oxford degree, then spends a year travelling in Greece and Turkey. On his

way back, meeting her and her husband in Switzerland, he realizes his love - too late! A couple of

years later, now a college fellow, he visits her, now a mother, and she tells him that his studies have

left him only half alive. He takes her advice and leaves the University.

The autobiographical elements are clear – Clough’s boyhood holidays with cousins, his

bookishness, his resignation from his fellowship, his recent travels. Attempts to identify ‘Emily’

have not succeeded, but her name was perhaps a tribute to Emily Tennyson. The poem is sensitively

written, and the growth of the characters is drawn with subtlety. He seems to have been in nostalgic

mood, recalling lost loves and wondering how life might have been different if he had married

somebody else. In lines from MS B (italicised below) he even came close to acknowledging the

sexual problem that had tormented his youth16

(Poems, after II, l. 153; 776):

[passions... wants...] obscurely worked

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Without their names and unexplained

And with a sense of secret sin

Were hidden and repressed within,

And only half, like sin, restrained.

The remainder of MS B is taken up by ‘Spectator ab Extra’ – a version of Dipsychus, scene V, lines

130-195, expanded to 102 lines and transposed to France, reflecting the rich food and drink of the

French hotels he had passed through. The last stanza especially suggests that the temptations of

Dipsychus are still very much alive (Poems, 701):

And the angels in pink and the angels in blue,

In muslin and moirés so lovely and new,

What is it they want, and so wish you to guess -

But if you have money the answer is Yes.

So needful they tell you is money, heigh-ho!

So needful it is to have money.

Clough left again for France on 6th

July. He knew from Palgrave (letter no. 1048 of 3rd

July) that the

Tennysons had ‘fled in the direction of Auvergne’17

, indeed he may already have been contriving an

‘accidental’ meeting with them, for Matthew Arnold, in his last ever letter to Clough, sent from

Brighton on the 5th

in reply to a letter of ‘a day or two ago’, said he considered Auvergne ‘not worth

going to except for a geologist’; he recommended instead ‘the mountain country of the Haute Loire,

about Puy [en Velay].’ Yet, strangely, Clough does not seem to have told Blanche in advance of his

plan; he wrote to her from Paris (letter no. 1052 of the 8th

): ‘I shall then go to Auvergne [his

emphasis] – write if you please to Clermont-Ferrand – and so round to Geneva in good time’.

After a few days in Paris, he travelled via Clermont to Mont Dore, which he reached on 15th

July,

two days before the Tennysons. At first the weather was cold and wet, and on Tuesday 16th

he wrote

to Blanche unenthusiastically about this ‘queer place’ (letter no. 1059; Corr. 589; PPR, 262), saying

he thought he would leave on Friday and be in Geneva by Monday. The next day he began to enjoy

himself, as described in letter no. 1060 (PPR, 262-3 amalgamates with the previous letter):

Today the weather changed at 11 a.m. – I went for a long walk along a road but through a

sort of forest hill country, i.e. along mountain sides partly open partly covered with dense

sapins.

Tomorrow I go with a riding party to the chief mountain top Puy de Sancy. I think, if

weather still be fine – there are also one or two more things to do – so that probably I may

stay even till Monday.

7

‘Tis an odd enough place to be in – déjeuner at 10, diner at 5½ two tables of about 25

people all French – We also have a drawing room where we meet before meals and sit

generally (only I don’t) – gentlemen unbeknown to ladies give their arms to ladies aforesaid

to conduct ‘em into dinner and occasionally out from dinner. I sat near some pleasantish

people at dinner – a Parisian of the Parisians on one hand and a Marseilles opulent-seeming

merchant with a wife, a sister and some children on t’other.

Last night from 8 to 9½ was a soirée magicale – things coming out of hats etc. etc. followed

by a divertissement of a poet and improvisateur who did tout rimer – the company supplied

him for his last épreuve with about 14 or 16 words – rhymes masculine and feminine –

mitraille, canaille, volcan, encore ending with baigneur and bonheur, which gave him the

opportunity – the subject by the way being given him after the rhymes, viz. vin de

champagne – to wish in conclusion chaque aimable baigneur I don’t know how much

bonheur which of course drew the house. The poet’s face was a great and round simple

looking piece of countenance and he was fat but alert and knew more tricks than one I dare

say. The only verse I remember was

…………………………………….mitraille

Le champagne n’est pas le vin de la canaille.

I think it is possible I may stay even longer so if there is anything particular write here as

well.

Clough did indeed stay longer, with outings every day from the Wednesday to the Saturday. Having

initially said he would head for Geneva on Friday 19th

, he was finally to leave for the Pyrenees on

Thursday 25th

. On Sunday 21st he wrote to Blanche (letter no. 1062; Corr. 591; PPR 264):

My plans are changed. This morning about 8½ going across the place to the café whom

should I see but Tennyson… They had been here two days. They go to the Pyrenees and I

am to follow them. They go tomorrow – I’ve sent some boots to mend and can’t go till

Tuesday or Wednesday.

The Tennysons were there in strength, with the two boys, aged nine and seven, their young tutor,

Henry Dakyns, and a nurse, Elisabeth Andrews. Only Tennyson himself could get a room in Mont

Dore; the rest of the party were at La Bourboule, four miles to the west, on the road to Laqueuille17

.

Recalling it much later, Hallam Tennyson said they were not enjoying their holiday much, but that

is not the impression given by his childhood diary18

. Clough took Hallam on his own to a waterfall

that afternoon. On Monday morning he went out with Tennyson and Dakyns, and in the afternoon

they all made an expedition. By the time he wrote his next letter to Blanche (no. 1063, of Tuesday

8

23rd

, unpublished paragraphs) he had postponed his departure and changed his reason for delay:

I go from this on Thursday – could I only get my linen I would go sooner and shall be at

Bordeaux on Saturday… The Tennysons started this morning…

This alas is a wet day again. If it be fine tomorrow and if I get back my linen I think I shall

start but probably it won’t be fine.

In fact it was fine, but instead of leaving he went up the plateau for a view of the lake. The change

of pretext from boots to linen could be procrastination. There is a further mystery: he had agreed to

follow the Tennysons to ‘Bagnères’ but they meant Bagnères de Bigorre, and Clough headed for

Bagnères de Luchon. Was there a genuine misunderstanding, or was his choice deliberate? His

behaviour in the next six weeks suggests strangely mixed feelings about being with the Tennysons.

At the same time, his letters home seem to have contradictory aims, on the one hand to reassure

Blanche that all was well, for example by holding out the prospect of being with the Tennysons, and

on the other to solicit her sympathy for his supposed loneliness, and even her jealousy over the

mixed company he was keeping.

There are suggestive parallels with Clough’s journey in two tales written later in the year. In

‘Lawyer II’, it is because he waits for his linen that the tutor stays on in the Highland inn and is

seduced. ‘The Clergyman’s Second Tale’ (hereafter ‘Clergyman II’) tells of an office worker, nine

years married, travelling alone in France on sick-leave. Feeling hurt because his wife insists on him

remaining abroad, he lets a ‘Junonian’ beauty lure him into her hotel bed. Smitten with remorse, he

flees, arrives late at night, ‘four days from his fall’, in a French provincial town, and leaves next day

after sending letters, including a confession to his wife. Clough arrived late on Sunday 28th in

Tarbes, four days after leaving Mont Dore, and went on next day after posting his application to

extend his sick leave.

Clough did indeed feel hurt that Blanche was pressing him to remain abroad beyond September. In

answer to her letter to this effect (no. 1061, Corr. 590), he wrote on the 23rd (no. 1063; Corr. 591-

2):

I don’t understand what this is all about – I want to come back in September and see no

sufficient reason yet for not returning to work in November. I don’t at all want to spend a

winter abroad, away from the children [note, not ‘you and the children’] – and were I to be

brought to do so, I should want to come home first.

He returned to the theme of his resentment in his letter of Tuesday 30th

July, the day after he arrived

in Luchon (no. 1067, Corr. 594):

I think it very funny of you people at home – Flo and all of you – to suppose that it can be so

very pleasant or easily endurable to stay poking about abroad for more than two or three

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months at a time, all by oneself or something no better – or perhaps worse.

What would have been worse than being alone if not being in the wrong company – the wrong

female company?

It is possible, even probable, as suggested by Sir Anthony Kenny19

, that Clough had a close

encounter with an attractive woman in Mont Dore, perhaps the sister of the gentleman from

Marseilles. Even supposing that there was no physical sex, he would have felt bad enough about

simply having wanted it and imagined it. He was clearly excited by the spectacle of ‘gentlemen

unbeknown’ to ladies escorting them into and out from dinner. The idea of people getting into the

wrong hotel bed was exercising him, for the next poem he pencilled in his diary was

‘Juxtaposition’, which was to become ‘The American’s Tale’. It is the story of a young woman who,

in an American hotel, accidentally gets into the bed of a strange man; nothing happens, but she ends

up marrying him. Intriguingly, Clough left four sides blank between line 11, the going to bed, and

line 12, the awakening – the only place in the whole diary with four consecutive blank pages.

At all events, Clough left Mont Dore early on Thursday July 25th

to catch the mail coach to Tulle.

Next day he continued by coach to Brive-la-Gaillarde and then by train to Bordeaux, where he spent

two nights. The next poem in the diary describes the journey to Tulle and so can be firmly dated.

(This also dates ‘Juxtaposition, of which the first 19 lines precede it and lines 20-35 follow it.) As

he wrote it in ink, it is likely to have been in his hotel room, probably in Tulle. A fair copy is the

first poem in MS A, hence the supposition that he bought the notebook in Bordeaux on the

Saturday. He entitled it ‘A la Banquette or a Modern Pilgrimage’ suggesting that already the thought

of Chaucer was present.

The next tale in MS A - ‘Edmund and Emma’ or ‘Fellow-Service’, later to become ‘The

Clergyman’s First Tale’ (hereafter ‘Clergyman I’) – must have been written at Luchon. Blanche

thought it might have been written on the Greek tour (PPR, 51), but she was clearly mistaken. The

two young people rediscover each other after having matured through long years of separation and

introspection; they marry, as Clough had done, on the basis that ‘love is fellow-service’, but we do

not discover how their marriage turned out. This is followed in MS A by the first version of

‘Actaeon’, a highly sensual poem, telling of the hunter’s fatal glimpse of Artemis bathing in her

‘ambrosial nakedness’. With its wealth of detail, including the mention of seven tree and shrub

species, it sounds as if it had been drawn from life. Perhaps Clough, on an excursion from Luchon,

was indeed inspired by a glimpse of a nude bather.

Clough claimed to be distressed at not finding the Tennysons at Luchon. In the closing paragraph

(unpublished) of his letter of 30/31st July, no. 1067, he wrote:

I am pretty well convinced my dear that the Tennysons are suddenly gone home again…

10

Anyway, I think they would have turned up before this if they were here. This is rather a

nuisance for me – I don’t think that Pyreneeing alone will be very delightful – however I

must try.

In fact Pyreneeing – not entirely alone - was sufficiently delightful for him to spend 12 days in

Luchon, where he received the news that Blanche had given birth on 5th

August to their daughter,

whom he named Blanche Athena. He recorded four excursions – one with a family from Tours, one

with Pierre Redonnet, an ex-hussar, one with Pierre’s cousin Jean and one on his own. He heard on

the 7th

, by a letter from Dakyns (who thus knew where he was), that the Tennysons were in Bigorre.

Despite his repeated complaints about missing them, he left almost as soon as they arrived in

Luchon. On Friday 9th

August (letter no. 1074 to Blanche – incomplete in PPR, 266) he wrote:

Today comes a note to say that the Tennysons are coming here this evening – and I have

already taken my place for Luz via Bigorre! Go I must and I shall – and what they’ll do I

don’t know… I don’t propose to stay long at Luz unless indeed the Tennysons (which is

possible) come after me there.

They arrived at Luchon at eight that evening, and at half past nine Clough said goodbye to them. He

left early next morning on the two-day journey to Luz.

On his first day at Luz, Monday 12th

August, Clough walked to the watering place at Saint Sauveur

and a little way up the valley. This was perhaps when he followed the young woman of ‘Currente

Calamo’ (‘with hurrying pen’), which he wrote next morning, sending a copy to Blanche with the

letter he started on the 13th (no. 1077; PPR, 267). With its sensuous description of her olive skin,

her dark eyes, her jet-black hair, ‘thence passing down / A skirt of darkest yellow brown, / Coarse

stuff, allowing to the view / The smooth limbs to the woollen shoe’, it was an extraordinary thing to

send a wife who had just given birth. It is as if he felt that Blanche was too detached and ought to be

jealous. In MS A, this stands between the two versions of ‘Actaeon’; voyeurism was certainly on

his mind.

The initial plan for Tales was now clear. In MS A, following the second version of ‘Actaeon’,

Clough wrote the title ‘Mari Magno or Tales on Board’, a fair copy of the Preface, which he had

pencilled into the back of the diary, then bridge passages to join on ‘The Lawyer’s [First] Tale’ and

‘The Clergyman’s [First] Tale’, then a bridge to, and fair copy of, ‘The American’s Tale’

(‘Juxtaposition’), and finally ‘My Tale’ (‘A Modern Pilgrimage’), excluding ‘Currente Calamo’.

Most of the connecting passages had first been pencilled in the diary. After the end of ‘My Tale’ is

the first line of an envoi – ‘Where lies the Land to which the ship would go’ (the poem once entitled

‘Mari Magno’). When he later decided to finish with arrival in Boston, this mid-ocean envoi ceased

to be appropriate and was deleted.

11

The Preface introduces the storytellers, a group of passengers on a transatlantic steamer such as

Clough had sailed on in 1852 in the company of Thackeray and Lowell. The narrator is a youth,

travelling with his ‘guardian friend’, a lawyer aged 33 – Clough’s age in 1852. The conversation

turns to marriage (lines 87-90):

Marriage is discipline, the wise had said,

A needful human discipline to wed;

Novels of course depict it final bliss, -

Say, had it ever really once been this?

The American makes a proposal (lines 95-98):

‘You’ll reason on till night and reason fail.

My judgement is you each shall tell a tale;

And as on marriage you can not agree,

Of love and marriage let the stories be.’

At the time of The Bothie, Clough had believed that the deep union of a loving couple, the radical

undergraduate poet Philip Hewson and the crofter’s daughter, Elspie Mackaye, could be a basis for

marriage. Concern over the uncertainty of love darkened the tone of Amours de Voyage. His

experience in Venice, reflected in Dipsychus, led him to fear that lust might replace love, and he

arrived at the idea of fellow-service as the only foundation for marriage; but had the reality satisfied

him or did he still long for a deep union? The format of Tales allowed him to turn his inner debate

into a sequence of stories.

The most puzzling thing is that Tales was originally to culminate in ‘My Tale’, describing Clough’s

coach journey of 25th

July, put into the mouth of a callow youth, who claims no experience of love.

Apart from the coachman’s song, lamenting that he is no longer young enough for love, it appears

to have no relevance to the theme. The simplest hypothesis is that it is in fact about marriage,

treated allegorically and told by an unmarried man to deter readers from supposing that it is about

Clough’s own experience. It starts with a lyrical passage recalling the exalted mood of some of his

poems of the 1840s and expressing the sort of freedom enjoyed by those who have no ties (lines 8-

18):

The mountains of Auvergne are all in sight;

The Puy de Sancy and the Puy de Dôme,

Were Puy on Puy, you’d see the gates of Rome.

Green pastoral heights that once in lava flowed,

Of primal fires the product and abode,

And all the plateaux and the lines that trace

12

Where in deep dells the waters find their place;

Far to the south above the lofty plain

The Plomb du Cantal lifts his towering train.

Ascend the steep and you may see the show;

Mid-day was burning, and I did not go.

This ‘mid-day’ may echo Dante’s ‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita - midway through life’;

Clough was 35 when he married. The poem makes two contrasts: firstly between moving freely

about the puys and then being carried along willy-nilly, confined in a vehicle, secondly between the

imposing nature of the diligence, with its four cart-horses, and the triviality of the conversation

inside it. Given the present hypothesis, these would symbolize the contrasts between bachelor life

and marriage, and between the grand claims made for marriage and the dullness of the reality.

The journey starts not at Mont Dore but at Laqueuille (cf. l’acceuil - ‘the welcome, the reception’),

a village dominated by a large church of black volcanic stone. The road at once drops precipitously

100 metres to the Plateau de Millevaches, a monotonous expanse of what was scrubby pasture. The

only distraction is the conversation of the all-male company. Clough’s fellow passengers talk of

their experience of the French war in Italy and the disappointments of revolution. A priest boards

the coach and tells a story about a miracle. To tease him, the driver sings a song, the burden of

which is that at fifty he must say goodbye to the love affairs of his youth, though the memory of the

girls he loved tempts him to ‘think I’m young in spite of all my years...’ ‘To leave is painful, but

absurd to stay.’

Eventually, weariness with the postilion’s story of a man and a horse sends the narrator to sleep. He

wakes at the end of the journey in Tulle, a town of dark stone, enclosed and viewless at the bottom

of a steep-sided valley, the road having taken another plunge down from the level of the plateau. He

sees nothing interesting, only ‘houses in a row’ (not very different from Clough’s London home!),

and goes ‘thankful... to bed’. If the monotonous coach journey represents marriage, then this is what

it leads to: an aching dullness, from which the only escape is sleep.

Clough remained satisfied for a while with this conclusion for Tales, as is plain from the evidence

of MS A. He had an obsessive interest in line counts, and little sums are dotted about the notebook.

The first, ending with ‘A Modern Pilgrimage’, is beside the title ‘Tales on Board’. He did not know

how many lines to count for ‘Lawyer I’, guessing 500, corrected to 700, and this no doubt is one

reason why he next embarked on a complete new fair copy. The decision to join ‘Currente Calamo’

to the rest of ‘My Tale’ clearly came later; the necessary bridge passage (first partially pencilled in

the diary) was written on pages facing the original ending, over-writing one of his sums. This had

certainly been done by 31st August, as he included lines 211-18 of the bridge, which are not in the

13

diary, with his letter of that day to Blanche, no. 1085 (paragraphs not in Corr.). He tactfully left out

line 210: ‘A peasant beauty, beauteous past compare’.

Meanwhile, Pyreneeing continued unabated. Clough’s letter no. 1077, completed on Thursday

August 15th

(unpublished paragraph), explained that he was ‘rather laid up with the Pyrenean

disorder of diarrhoea’ but had recovered on a diet of rice water. By the 17th

he felt well enough to

walk to the fortified Templar church at Barèges, 4 miles away - ‘a regular pool of Bethesda... a

desolate place in a bare pass with a staring établissement and a soldiers hospital and everybody on

crutches and the only apparent enjoyment card-playing in shabby cafes’ (letter of the 17th

, no. 1078,

PPR, 323). On the 18th

Clough went to Gavarnie, returning after ‘a hard day’s riding... more tired

than I have been this long time, so tired I could scarcely eat’ (letter no. 1081 unpublished

paragraph). The next two days were foggy. On the 21st he took the diligence to Cauterets, from

which he visited the Lac de Gaube next day.

All through this time he was exchanging letters with Emily Tennyson. His of the 13th

told her ‘I

make no plans till I hear from you’ and related the terrible death of Mrs Longfellow in a fire20

. In

letters to Blanche of the 15th

, 17th

and 21st he mentions having heard from Emily, and by the 17

th he

had promised to visit them in Luchon, but it was only on the 23rd

, after a second night at Cauterets,

that he began a three-day ride through the mountains to get there. The first day brought him to Luz,

where he received Blanche’s letter of the 18th (no. 1079, unpublished) proposing to join him at

‘Marseilles – Avignon – Bordeaux - somewhere Lyons, so as to go on apace’ early in September. He

was not yet ready to end his period of freedom, nor did travel so soon after childbirth seem wise,

and he replied straight away with letter no. 1082, Corr. 599-600:

As for plans hereafter – heaven knows: I didn’t think of your coming before October –

would it be wise to do so? to begin real travelling sooner? – And by that time the passes

would be no longer desirable I imagine [non sequitur].

Next day Clough started at 8.30 and rode, with detours, to Arreau, arriving at 6.30. On Sunday 24th

,

leaving at 6.30, he got to Luchon at 11. Emily and the boys were unwell, but he went on Monday

with Tennyson to the nearby cascades ‘des Demoiselles’ and ‘des Parisiens’, setting out next day on

the two-day ride back. As he was expecting them in Luz by the end of the week, this strenuous

journey seems to have been unwarranted. A consequence of his visit was that on the 26th

Emily sent

Blanche letter no. 1084, conveying exactly the message he would have wanted:

I do really hope this long separation will be repaid to you when you see the improved state

of Mr Clough’s health. It seems to me that even the Pyrenean illness which he has had has in

one way been satisfactory as proving increase of strength of his powers of recovery. Do not

be over hasty in coming to him. Be tolerably strong before you undertake the journey for his

14

sake.21

Clough reached Luz at 6 p.m. on Wednesday 28th

, having been in the saddle five days out of six. On

Thursday he went to St Sauveur and heard a lecture. On Friday he went up the Pic des Bergons. On

Saturday he went to St Sauveur again. That evening at 6.30 the Tennysons arrived. Out of the 40

days since they had left Mont Dore, he had spent one and a half days and one short evening with

them. For most of this time his mood seems to have been one of elation, with feverish creative

activity and manic travels to and fro, reminiscent of his criss-crossing of the Highlands in

September 1847.

Clough’s diary says for Sunday 1st ‘House hunting’, and for Monday ‘Gèdre in carriage. Woods on

fire.’ In his letter of Monday morning, no. 1086 (Corr. 602), he wrote ‘Today [Tennyson] and

Dakyns go to Gavarnie and sleep, which I shan’t.’ Emily’s journal, in the entry dated 1st September

(evidently written later), says ‘I go with A. and Mr Clough to ... Barèges … we drive one day to

Gèdre... The gentlemen go to Gavarnie. While they are there I send Elisabeth up Pic de Bergons

with Mr Clough’s guide.’ (Journal 160). Hallam’s diary makes it clear that on Monday morning

they all went to Gèdre by carriage, then Tennyson and Dakyns walked on to Gavarnie, where they

stayed till Wednesday, while Clough returned to Luz with Emily and the boys. Clough rode to

Gavarnie on Tuesday, briefly met Tennyson and Dakyns there, then left them and rode back to Luz.

Although he had seen so little of the Tennysons, his initial response to their arrival seems to have

been a desire to escape. On Sunday 1st, concluding letter 1085, which he had started the previous

day, he had said he would be in Pau by Monday 9th

(which would have meant leaving the following

Sunday). By Monday 2nd

, when he wrote letter no. 1086, he was proposing to leave Luz even

sooner: ‘Well, I shall go to Pau I think on Thursday’ – the day after Tennyson’s prospective return

from Gavarnie. He may have been uncomfortable in the presence of such a well matched couple; or

perhaps ashamed of what he had been doing or thinking while alone. Anyway, he added ‘write also

to Cauterets, for perhaps it may be a convenience to them if I take Mrs Tennyson and the boys

there’. He was still hoping to put off Blanche’s arrival, continuing (unpublished paragraph):

After Pau I meant to go to Eaux Chaudes – but must I turn northward to meet you? I don’t

know. To me the reasons for October seem good and really you will still have weather I

believe for the passes and for North Italy. We shall want I suppose 200£. When [do] you

propose to be back? [My italics]

That Monday morning he had received a letter from Blanche enclosing a few words written by 3½-

year-old Florence and a scrawl by baby Arthur. It may have been this that provoked the writing of

‘Clergyman II’ – the story of a repentant adulterer, who was too stiff-necked to accept his wife’s

forgiveness and stayed away until his daughter’s illness forced him back to his family. His remorse

15

and flight were provoked (lines 140-43) when a letter

Came from his wife, the little daughter too

In a large hand – the exercise was new –

To her papa her love and kisses sent:-

Into his heart and soul it went.

According to Blanche (letter to Norton, no. 1122 of 19th

March 1862, Poems, 794-5) this gloomy

tale ‘was written in one night, while he was staying with the Tennysons in the Pyrenees.’ The night

of Tuesday 3rd

September, after his solitary ride to Gavarnie, seems the most likely. The 32 lines

(186-95 and 198-219) pencilled in the diary had presumably already been written, perhaps that

same day, leaving about 200 to compose in the night to make up the original of approximately 230

lines, on recto pages in MS A. To these Clough added a further 90-odd lines (of which 342 to 358

were first pencilled in the diary) on facing pages and at the end, and he made many corrections.

Up to this point, Clough seems to have been reticent with Tennyson. An undated incident recounted

by Dakyns, according to Miss F. M. Stawall, may help to explain this:

I remember once at a discussion on metre Clough would not say one word, and at last

Tennyson turned to him with affectionate impatience, quoting Shakespeare in his deep

kindly voice ‘Well, goodman Dull, what do you say?’... I can’t give the sweet, humorous

tone that made the charm of it.22

Clough may not have been charmed. He had published no poetry in England for more than 12 years

and may have felt inadequate in the presence of the Poet Laureate. Tennyson too was reserved;

Hallam Tennyson recalls that at Gavarnie ‘Mr Clough noticed how silent my father was and how

absorbed by the beauty of the mountain’ (Memoir, 474, cf. Journal, 160).

Clough was clearly at ease with Emily. If he had any confessions to make, she would have been the

person to hear them. She was fresh from helping to hold the Weld family together, having received

them all at Farringford after the adultery and disgrace of her brother-in-law, Charles Weld23

.

Following Monday’s visit to Gèdre, Clough was ‘with Mrs T in the prairies’ on Wednesday, and on

Friday he travelled by carriage with her, Elizabeth and the boys to Cauterets, while the other two

men walked. He was thus Emily’s companion for three days out of five that week. One would give

a great deal to know what they said to each other. She certainly revered him; at the time of a visit

from Blanche (18th

July 1871), she wrote: ‘Independent of all likings for herself, Mrs C. and her

children have for his sake a kind of sacredness in our eyes.’ (‘his’ italicised in Letters, 159 note, not

in Journal, 327).

At any rate, by the end of that week he had lost his urge to escape, and he spent the following week

with the Tennysons in Cauterets. On Saturday – a misty day – the men went to the ‘sacred valley’,

16

where Tennyson had been with Arthur Hallam 31 years earlier, and Clough walked ‘up the valley

with AT alone’, seeing the ‘stately pine set in a cataract on an island crag’ that figured in The

Princess (V, 334-5), while Dakyns considerately stayed behind (Friends, 205). That evening,

Tennyson wrote his poem ‘In the Valley of Cauteretz’24

. On Sunday the three men went up to the

Lac de Gaube, rowed on it and drank a pint of port. There were local outings every day for the rest

of the week. It seems likely to have been during this second week that Clough felt sufficiently at

ease with Tennyson to read to him from Tales, breaking down and crying ‘like a child’ (Memoir,

475, note).

During his fortnight with the Tennysons, Clough thought of further expansion. He penned an

incomplete tale by an artillery officer in the diary after the additions to ‘My Tale’, and he wrote an

introduction for it in MS A on the verso page facing the beginning of the fair copy of ‘Lawyer I’.

This seems to have been abandoned, to be replaced perhaps by ‘The Mate’s Story’ (Blanche

Clough’s title), which follows ‘Clergyman II’ in MS A; but he seems to have returned to the

officer’s story at a later date, pencilling a second version in his diary. These two tales look like

alternatives; each is a brief story of a damsel in distress rescued by an unexpected proposal of

marriage. Either could have satisfied the need for a counterpart to ‘The American’s Tale’, and also

for a more popular voice to set against those of the professional men. In MS A, the Mate’s Story

meets a prose translation of Odyssey Book ix, lines 1-93, running from the back of the notebook.

Clough by now had a rendezvous with Blanche fixed for 18th

September in Paris. Dakyns left on

Wednesday 11th

, but Emily was unwell and the rest of the party delayed their departure till Saturday

when they went to Lourdes and L’Estelle. On Sunday they reached Pau, where Clough left them on

Monday 16th

. In her journal, Emily wrote:

At Pau Mr Clough leaves us. A sad parting. There could not have been a gentler, kinder,

more unselfish companion than he has been. Among other kind things he corrected the boys’

journals for them; we called him the ‘child-angel’ (Journal, 161; Memoir, 475)

In sharp contrast, in her diary of his last weeks, held in Balliol College Library (unpublished),

Blanche described how she found him when they met:

I was soon struck by his general languor, by the half-pain which it caused him to hear of

things at home, partly as if he longed to be among them and partly as if he could not bear the

effort of mind. He said after a little while ‘I think you shan’t tell me any more about people

in England’.

It sounds as though she was chattering away, insensitive to the thoughts and feelings that lay

beneath his silence. She may not yet even have known that he had written a long poem.

Remarkably, he had never mentioned it in his letters home, apart from sending two fragments.

17

Clough’s breakout was over. He and Blanche made an exhausting journey to Italy, with nights at

Dijon, Salins, Neuchatel, Vevey, Sion, Berisal, Domodossola, Stresa, Milan, Parma and Porretta

Terme. He caught a chill by the Italian lakes and took to his bed on 10th

October when they reached

Florence. He developed a high fever but was able to work on a last tale. His sister Annie hurried

down from Ambleside to be with him, arriving on the 9th

. He died on 13th

November in the city of

Florence Nightingale’s birth, seven weeks short of his 43rd

birthday. He was buried in the Protestant

Cemetery, near to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The only clue we have to his state of mind in his last two months is ‘Christian’ or ‘Lawyer II’.

Blanche said it ‘was conceived and written entirely during his last illness’ (PPR, 51). In fact he

surely thought of it as soon as he had written ‘Clergyman II’, for without it Tales would have been

unbalanced both structurally and emotionally. His notebook was full, so he pencilled the draft into

his diary wherever there was space between the pages for 8th

April and 25th

November. Blanche

wrote in her diary of those last weeks in Florence:

He liked me to be there and not to stay too long away, but liked me to go too... [He] used to

keep his book under his pillow and write; I think that is why he did not mind my going

away, for he could not talk about it.

He developed a high temperature but managed to make a fair copy of the first 282 lines. Early in

November he suffered a stroke but was able to help Blanche to continue the fair copy to line 425.

When she could not find lines 418-25 in the diary he recomposed them with a painfully shaky hand.

These were his last written words. She transcribed the rest after his death.

‘Lawyer II’ is an echo of The Bothie, without the speeches. It is the story of an Oxford don, another

Philip, who stays on in Scotland after his students have gone home from their reading party. In a

Highland inn, he falls for Christian or Chirstie the chambermaid. Her name must surely be taken as

indicating the virtues he attributed to her. Katie the cook contrives to get the two into bed together.

He escorts her to her aunt and uncle in Glasgow, who let the couple live together for a week before

he has to return to Oxford, promising to come back in three weeks but without making clear his

intention to marry her. The relatives do not trust him and trick her into sailing with them to

Australia where she bears his child. He leaves the University, seeks her in vain in Australia, returns,

becomes a successful writer and marries a Lady Mary. Many years later he glimpses Christian at a

party in London and sends Lady Mary to meet her. The two women agree that he should take over

the upbringing of his son, also called Philip. Christian, about to return to Australia, tells him in a

letter that she has loved him all along. The story - and the debate of Tales – concludes with last

words (lines 510-11) worthy of this most paradoxical of poets:

O love, love, love, too late! The tears fell down.

18

He dried them up - and slowly walked to town.

There are echoes here of Clough’s Scottish reading parties, of the Highland lassies who appear

several times in his earlier poems, of Philip Hewson, the ‘Chartist’ student poet (and perhaps of

Lady Maria) in The Bothie, of his leaving Oxford and of his attempt to get a professorship in

Australia. It seems certain that he was deeply attracted by a woman in the Highlands, most likely in

the autumn of 1847, and that he was fascinated by her naturalness. The person he called ‘

‘the foreign woman’ in his diary entry for 6th

September of that year may have been the one who

made him realize that Highland women could be very different from the English, as Elspie explains

in The Bothie (VII, 11-12), not

Locking up as in a cupboard the pleasure that any man gives them,

Keeping it out of sight as a prize they need be ashamed of…

Blanche hesitated before including Tales in her 1862 edition. Finally, she printed only the

clergyman’s tales and ‘My Tale’, ending the poem with the sanctimonious cleric instead of the

tolerant lawyer, creating an impression of conventionality and conformism. In a serious editorial

misjudgement, she assigned ‘Clergyman I’ to the lawyer, losing the contrast of voices that Clough

intended25

. She rectified this in 1863 and PPR2 (but not many people who had the first edition

would also read the second), and she also restored the lines (‘Clergyman II’, 328-337), in which

Clough distances himself from the clergyman by presenting three views of the story:

The Artillery Captain, as we went below,

Said to the lawyer: ‘Life could not be meant

To be so altogether innocent.

What did the atonement show?’ He for the rest,

Could not, he thought, have written and confessed.

‘Weakness it was, and adding crime to crime,

To leave his family that length of time.’

The lawyer said. The American was sure

Each nature knows instinctively its cure.

Like his protagonists, with their many echoes of his own life, Clough was metaphorically at sea. As

in his other long poems, the different voices in Tales represent different sides in his internal debates.

The clergyman is both the Spirit from Dipsychus, urging a worldly view of marriage, and

Dipsychus, expressing horror at material and sexual temptations. The lawyer is more like Adam, the

tutor in The Bothie: ‘By nature he to gentlest thoughts inclined.’ He believes in love - and he has the

last word. Nothing could be further than his second tale from conventional morality. Philip and

Christian express no remorse for their love-making; their only regret is to have lost each other.

19

Katie the cook and the aunt and uncle all aid and abet the couple. Lady Mary enthusiastically adopts

her illegitimate stepson. No one is seriously punished and there is a bitter-sweet ending.

Some critics may have been influenced, at least unconsciously, by the impression that Tales was the

work of a dying man, no longer in possession of his full powers. However, even in the case of

‘Lawyer II’, there is no reason to believe that Clough composed it with any sense of imminent

death. By the end of August, when he made his marathon ride from Cauterets to Luchon and back to

Luz, he perhaps felt that he had recovered his health and that his main problems lay elsewhere. A

succession of women inflamed his imagination – the lawyer’s ‘Emily’, ‘Artemis’, several peasant

beauties, the memory of his Highland ‘Christian’, the ‘Juno’ of Mont Dore, above all, perhaps,

Emily Tennyson... In 1861 Clough broke his silence to show that he was, at least in mind, very

much alive.

20

Appendix

Letter from Blanche Clough to Emily Tennyson

This letter is held in the Tennyson collection at Lincoln Central Library. Judging by the writer’s

reluctance to write before she has better news, it may be the only - or almost the only - letter sent

from the sickroom in which Clough died. It is not listed in Mulhauser’s catalogue of all known

letters, and it does not appear to have been published in its entirety before (but see Patrick Scott,

Tennyson Research Bulletin (Lincoln, 1969) 1:3, 64-70). The postscript is mysterious. Was it a

private message to Emily? What was the three weeks old ‘Cauterets Baby’, and what did he hear

when it ‘squalled’? Clough was in Cauterets alone on the 22nd

and rode from there to Luchon to see

the Tennysons in 3 crazy days, 23rd

to 25th

August. Counting backwards three weeks from the 17th

of September, when he arrived in Paris, takes us to 27th

August, the day he started his ride back to

Luz. It is here reproduced with acknowledgement to the Tennyson Research Centre, Lincolnshire

County Council.

*****

[P.S] Arthur says perhaps you will be glad to hear that the 3 weeks old Cauterets Baby entered Paris

safely with him. He heard it squall just before arriving in Paris.

Care of [illegible]

Macquary and Pakenham

Florence

Oct 19 / 61

My Dear Mrs Tennyson,

My husband has for several days been entreating me to write to you, he is anxious to hear

how you accomplished your return home and I should have most willingly obeyed him but that I

wished to wait a few days longer to give a better account of himself. We have now been here since

Thursday week (10th

) and he has since then been suffering from a bad feverish attack which he

caught we suppose either at the Lakes or at Milan. They are unfortunately common now, but now he

is not in any danger before now, and he is improving, but it has been a sad blight on our hopes of

improvement for him from this journey. I cannot yet tell you what we may find it well to do, till he

has thrown off the fever, but I hope it may be to stay on here quietly, where there is plenty to see,

some kind friends and a good doctor, who has I think done very carefully and kindly for him. So we

have some things to be thankful for in this trouble. I have to thank you very much for your kind

21

little note long ago which I always intended to answer sooner, but waited to have been settled

happily somewhere.

If you can spare time to let us hear how you are and most especially yourself it would be a

great pleasure to us and a relief too to him. He was so happy with you in the Pyrenees, and it was

quite like adopting another family, his interest about the boys. We have good accounts of our 3 little

ones. We are so sorry Mr Browning is no longer here.

My husband is now lying on the sofa turning over the Golden Treasury, and I am sorry to

say inveighing against Mr Palgrave as a Pedant – but I believe the smallness of the print affects his

temper more than the pedantic arrangement. I wish it had been better type.

Will you excuse this scrappy letter. I wish we were back again at that nice little cottage at

Freshwater with all my heart; we have had a hard time of it ever since. I wish he would have let me

wait a few days longer, for I think they would have allowed me to write much more cheerfully

about him. He has never been in danger, and has always been able to get up for some hours and to

take considerable nourishment. He desires to be most kindly remembered to you and Mr Tennyson

and sends his love to the Boys. He hopes they have made their journals all quite correct.

Believe me dear Mrs Tennyson

Very sincerely yours, BMS Clough

22

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nicholas Jacobs and Ann Thwaite for helpful comments, to Anthony Kenny for

much help in the course of this research, to Patrick Scott for pointing out the value of material held

at the Tennyson Research Centre, Lincolnshire County Council, and to Grace Timmins, Collections

Officer at the Centre, for bringing to my attention Blanche Clough’s letter to Emily Tennyson, and

to Hilary Attfield for careful attention to my manuscript

Notes

1. It has been suggested by J. P. Phelan, in “The Textual Evolution of Clough’s Dipsychus and the

Spirit,” Review of English Studies, 46 (1993): 230-239, that Clough wrote six scenes of

Dipsychus after October 1854. The evidence cited is the mention, in scene 3 (a scene suppressed

by Blanche Clough) line 172, of Sidney Herbert sending women out to colonize, which Phelan

supposes to refer to Florence Nightingale and her nurses, but it is clear that it refers to Herbert’s

founding of the Female Emigration Fund in 1849 – on which Disraeli commented ’35,000

needlewomen to be deported at £5 a-piece!’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography under

Herbert, Sidney). Phelan also relies on the reference to Ruskin (scene 5, line 225), but this does

not need to be later than 1851, year of publication of volume I of John Ruskin, Stones of Venice

(London, Smith, Elder, 1851-54). The argument against Phelan’s view was further developed by

Sir Anthony Kenny in an unpublished talk delivered at Dr Williams’ Library, University

College, London on 3rd

February 2010.

2. Michael Thorpe, Editor, Clough: the Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972)

193; 230; 387. H. W. Garrod, Poetry and the Criticism of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1931), 122-3.

3. Frederick. L. Mulhauser, editor, The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1974; abbreviated to Poems), 671.

4. Apart from the references to ancient history in the travels described in the first tale, there is only

one place – a learned joke - where a classical education heightens appreciation: Edmund in

‘Clergyman I’ says ‘Erotion! I saw it in a book... I do not love; I want, I try to love. This is not

love, but lack of love instead’ (lines 161-164). ‘Erotion’ does not bear the fanciful meaning he

gives it; it is the name of the little slave girl whose death is mourned in three of Martial’s

Epigrams.

5. References to The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough (London: Macmillan,

23

1869), volumes I and II, are abbreviated to PPR1 (prose), and PPR2 (poems).

6. Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds (London: Longmans, 1964), 133 quotes a letter to

Henry Dakyns from Symonds, who was Blanche’s collaborator over the publication of PPR:

‘The memoir is written - inadequately, but still written – by Mrs Clough’.

7. Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, (New York: Appleton, 1904), II 62.

8. Letter numbers refer to the catalogue on pp. 622-649 of Frederick L Mulhauser, editor, The

Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), II -

abbreviated to Corr. Some letters are in PPR, but this source partially rewrites the text and also

combines letters of different dates without indicating the fact. Transcriptions here have been

made from the originals held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

9. Quoted in Edward T. Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale (London: Macmillan, 1913), II 12.

10. William J. Stillman, The Autobiography of a Journalist (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1901), I 302-

3.

11. Robindra K. Biswas, Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration, (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1972), 439. (Further references abbreviated to Reconsideration.)

12. Grosskurth, op.cit., 150-51.

13. A detailed account of the visit to Freshwater is given by Patrick Scott, ‘The Cloughs visit the

Tennysons’, Tennyson Research Bulletin (Lincoln, 1977) 3:1 10-13. On the general subject of

Clough’s relations with Tennyson, see idem, ‘Tennyson and Clough’, Tennyson Research

Bulletin (Lincoln, 1969), 1:3 64-70.

14. James O. Hoge, editor, Lady Tennyson’s Journal (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,

1981), 158. (Further references abbreviated to Journal.). Hallam’s little diary has not been

published; it is held in the Tennyson Research Centre. Although he had only his ninth birthday

that summer, he gives many useful details.

15. In letter no. 1082 of 23rd

August, Clough speaks of ‘recovering my bag per diligence at 12 –

which enables me to write’.

16. Anthony Kenny, editor, The Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1990), lxii.

17. Cecil Y Lang, editor, Letters of Matthew Arnold (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,

1997), II 79-82. This letter is not listed in Corr.

18. Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: a Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1897), i, 472.

24

(Further references abbreviated to Memoir.)

19. Anthony Kenny, Arthur Hugh Clough: a Poet’s Life (London: Continuum, 2005), 279-280.

20. Letter in Yale, not listed by Mulhauser, quoted by Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: the Poet’s Wife

(London: Faber and Faber, 1996) 363, 669.

21. James O. Hoge, editor, The Letters of Emily Lady Tennyson (University Park: Pennsylvania

State University, 1974), 159. (Further references abbreviated to Letters.)

22. Hallam Tennyson, editor, Tennyson and his Friends (London: Macmillan, 1911), 203 (Further

references abbreviated to Friends). Dakyns joined the Tennysons as tutor on 20th

February 1861,

so the incident could have occurred either at Freshwater or – less probably – in France. In Love’s

Labours Lost, Act V, scene i, Holofernes says to Dull ‘Via, goodman Dull! Thou hast spoken no

word all this while.’ Dull replies: ‘Nor understood none neither, sir.’ Tennyson was perhaps

mocking himself as well as teasing Clough, since the conversation that Dull had failed to

understand was a parody of academic verbosity, but Clough was no stranger to scholarship.

23. The Tennysons’ choice of itinerary may have been influenced by Charles Weld’s books,

Auvergne, Piedmont and Savoy (1850) and The Pyrenees, West and East (1858), the latter

dedicated to Mrs Alfred Tennyson.

24. Tennyson, and after him Hallam, confused the dates of the trip, thinking that the family arrived

in Cauterets on Tennyson’s birthday, 6th

August, and that the poem was composed on 7th

August

(Memoir, 474); see also Christopher Ricks, editor, The Poems of Tennyson, (London: Longmans

Green, 1969), xxxi and 1123. This contradicts the evidence of Clough’s diary and letters and of

Emily’s Journal, 160. There is also the evidence of Dakyns’ letter from Bigorre, received by

Clough on 7th

August.

25. The bowdlerized 1862 version did not disappear. The third and fourth editions of Poems of

Arthur Hugh Clough, published in 1871 and 1883 respectively and reprinted altogether seven

times, leave out the Lawyer’s First Tale (and My Tale), and attribute the Clergyman’s First Tale

to the Lawyer. It was only with the fifth edition of 1888 that the whole of Tales, less the

American’s, was reprinted. In 1906 the 1862 edition resurfaced to mislead a new generation

when it was republished verbatim in London by George Routledge and Sons in the Muses’

Library series. E. P. Dutton & Co. In New York had rights in the series but appear not to have

printed that volume.